Microsoft PowerToys preview adds a smart Quick Access Shelf and FancyZones mouse-wheel switching
The new v0.101.2781.0 build leans hard into Command Palette work and nudges the project toward its 0.102 milestone.
Microsoft shipped PowerToys Preview v0.101.2781.0 today, and if you follow the project, the shape of it should be fairly obvious by now. It's the experimental "Preview" track, the lane ahead of the stable release, and this round is one of the more feature-heavy we've seen in a while. The bulk of it comes from the Command Palette team. FancyZones gets a genuinely useful trick on top.
The MIT-licensed project ships over 30 utilities. Window snapping, color picking, file renaming, OCR, and keyboard remapping all live in there. It's easily one of the most popular things in Microsoft's open-source ecosystem, and this build is a fine example of why.
The preview lands on top of v0.101.2712.0, which shipped on September 30. That makes it a two-week sprint between builds. Unusually fast for something this size.
Command Palette does most of the work
The Quick Access Shelf is the main event. It's a strip of pinned, one-click commands that shows up in the palette's compact mode, and Microsoft only rolled it out as an opt-in prototype two weeks ago. This build turns it into something that actually feels finished. It's the kind of Spotlight-style runner Mac users take for granted, but on Windows it remains one of the more ambitious things Microsoft has attempted in this space.
The Home page can now show a "Recent" section, and the compact shelf can hold up to five unpinned recent apps and commands, with the two kept visually separate. You can drag pinned items to reorder them, promote a recent item with a drop, and remove things through their own drop targets. Right-click menus landed on shelf items as well, plus Ctrl+Enter to fire off a secondary command and Ctrl+K to open the menu.
Want to inspect something before committing? Alt+Shift+1 through 9 selects an item without launching it, while Alt+1 through 9 jump straight to list pages.
Here's the catch, though. The shelf stays disabled by default, so you have to go find it in settings and flip it on. Microsoft is still polishing the surrounding settings organization too. It's close. Not quite there.
More is happening under the search bar as well. Fuzzy matching now works across the Settings page, so a mistyped query still finds what you're after. That one's been on the wishlist for a while. Dock focus cycling got a real fix: the shortcut that lands focus on the on-screen Dock now moves through items across multiple Docks and multiple monitors without snapping back, and you press Esc or Alt+Tab to leave. A fast-path for the Copilot key and Win+C now toggles the palette's visibility, and a separate fix stops it from snapping open and closed right after you launch an app.
A lot of the rest is the kind of work you mostly won't notice. Theme-aware SVG icons, shared icons to avoid re-extraction, and a fix for the blank app icons that popped up when stale unload notifications raced with recycled list rows. NativeAOT builds got their custom file-path inputs back, and a chosen language no longer silently reverts to English.
FancyZones, utilities, and the road to 0.102
FancyZones gets the standout usability tweak: scroll the mouse wheel to switch layouts while dragging a window, as long as zones are visible. There's a customizable indicator so you can see which layout you're actually on. It's off by default, which makes sense given it changes how a normal gesture behaves.
Mouse Utilities regains an Auto Hide Cursor fix that had stopped working on some touchpads, and Shortcut Guide gains Ableton Live 9 through 12 coverage plus an index generator that skips bad manifests instead of nuking the whole thing.
The vast majority of the Command Palette half was written by Jiri Polasek, who leads that effort. His pull requests basically make up the entire Command Palette contribution, which says everything about where the project's energy is going right now. The rest is spread across a batch of external contributors, from the FancyZones mouse-wheel code to the Shortcut Guide additions. LegendaryBlair handled tagging and publishing.
This preview quietly feeds into PowerToys 0.102, tracked as milestone 46. That release aims to modernize several utilities with WinUI 3 and expand Command Palette with tabs plus JavaScript/TypeScript extensions. The current build reads like groundwork for that push.
Getting the update
Microsoft distributed four installer builds, each in per-user and machine-wide versions and in both x64 and ARM64. You can grab them directly from the GitHub releases page, the Microsoft Store, or with winget install Microsoft.PowerToys, which respects your existing install scope. Early numbers put the per-user x64 build ahead, which tracks with how the project normally installs.
